Why We Just Can’t Quit Our Obsession With Vampires

Photo courtesy Sony Pictures Classics

Vampires; zombies; vampires; zombies. Over the past few decades, we’ve waffled between the two. In the post-Twilight era, the undead took over for bloodsuckers as pop culture’s monster of choice—possibly as a backlash. But now that we’ve had World War Z, four grueling seasons of The Walking Dead, and Warm Bodies, the pendulum is about to swing all over again. In other words, here come the vampires. (Sorry, werewolves.)

It’s not just zombie burn-out, though. Vampires are back because they’re timeless—in more ways than one.

The idea of the parasitic vampires is what I’m attracted to. Since I was a kid, I found that part of the vampiric myth the most rewarding.

— Guillermo del Toro on his inspiration for The Strain

And nowhere is that more true than in writer/director Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, out today. Previously known only as Untitled Movie Where Tom Hiddleston Plays a Sexy Vampire, the flick is an existential dive into what it would mean to live forever, to have to renegotiate “the mundane practicalities of having to reboot your interest constantly,” as star Tilda Swinton puts it. It’s about what happens after the great romance—in this case between Hiddleston’s Adam and Swinton’s Eve—when two people have to not only stay in love with each other, but also with the world, forever. (Good luck with that one, Bella.)

The vampires in Jarmusch’s film are smart, even funny. They embody everything that has made people fascinated with vampires for decades: They’ve seen everything we missed throughout history, and will see everything we’ll miss after we’re dead. And yet, like in Only Lovers, they still find joy in romance.

To Swinton, it’s no mystery why people are drawn to vampires. “Of course it’s immortality,” she says, “but I also think it’s the concept of the outsider, the feeling of humans who live up or down or sideways to society. Part of the vampire trope is there being no reflection when you look in the mirror; that feeling of there being no trace is really attractive.”

And Only Lovers is just the beginning of the vampire up-swell this year. This summer Guillermo del Toro and Carlton Cuse will unleash The Strain as a TV series on FX. Based on the book series del Toro wrote with Chuck Hogan, the series brings a whole new kind of bloodsucker to the mix—one that spreads like a virus and necessitates the intervention not of a priest, but of the CDC. It’s yet another move away from the Twilight-ing of vampire lore.

Tilda Swinton. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED“This is not a date vampire that will take you to dinner, he’s a guy that will have you for dinner,” del Toro told WIRED back when he was just about to start filming the series pilot.”The idea of the parasitic vampires is what I’m attracted to. When you read old Eastern European mythology and lore, there’s that great notion of a reanimated corpse. And if you go back far enough, it’s a possessed corpse.”

And when you look at it that way, the coming vampire influx really isn’t that different from the zombie one. Or, at least, they’re of the same genus, and this coming species is far darker and more horrifying than the last one. Which is a good thing. Vampires dating back to Bram Stoker’s Dracula more than 100 years ago have been dark, vicious creatures meant to symbolize our fear of death and inability to overcome it. They’re romantics, sure, but there’s much fertile ground to be covered outside the sentiment-saddled YA genre. “A vampire is so many things: serial killer, a romantic, a historian, a drug addict—they’re sort of all these things in one,” says director Ana Lily Amirpour, whose Iranian vampire flick A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night premiered at Sundance earlier this year, and could be coming soon to a screen near you. The same goes for What We Do in the Shadows, starring Flight of the Conchords‘s Jemaine Clement; it played at Sundance and South By Southwest, though it’s still seeking distribution. “I want us to be on a double-bill,” says Swinton, who saw Shadows at South By Southwest.

A vampire is so many things: serial killer, a romantic, a historian, a drug addict—they’re sort of all these things in one.

— director Ana Lily Amirpour

Of course, all these newcomers join a movement already in play. The vampires (and fairies, and shape-shifters…) of True Blood have stuck around throughout the shifts in pop-cultural tastes over the last few years. That show, however, is finally hitting the dirt after its final season airs on HBO this summer. And NBC’s series Dracula, which turned the titular vampire into an American entrepreneur, ended its first season in January. Meanwhile, Vampire Diaries is in its fifth season, having retained the attention of young adults while the zombie influx raged.

And, if none of the current crop is quite to your liking, well, there’s one more vampire about to rise from his coffin: Lestat. Anne Rice, for all practical purposes the mother of the vampire pop cultural moment in the 1980s and 1990s, announced just last month that she would would be reviving her Vampire Chronicles series with a new book, Prince Lestat. Amidst the flurry of new bloodsuckers on the horizon the announcement prompted Forbes to ask “Is Anne Rice too late to her own party with new Lestat book?” It answered the question with a comment from Rentrak media analyst Paul Dergarabedian, who said “she is still one of the architects of the cinematic transfer of popular novel to popular big screen movie … of course genre fatigue can set in with any overworked theme … [but] every movie has to rise and fall on its own merit.”

In other words, someone should score the movie rights now. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt are still working—and still nearly as ageless as their vampire counterparts from Interview with the Vampire. And if the film doesn’t get completed in time for the current vampire surge? No worries; it’ll be reanimated on the next go-round. If there’s one thing vampires have, it’s time.

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.